privations of its enjoyments, stop your ears for a moment to the sounds of merriment that charm you into a forgetfulness of other's woes, and listen to the solitary sighs of the widow or the feeble cries of the desolate orphans, that are idly wasted within the walls of their melancholy dungeons. Tear from your eyes that film of vanity and trifling, which, to use an idea of the inspired writings, gives to man an erroneous estimate of things by fascinating his senses, and descend in spirit into the varied recesses which misery inhabits in her most appalling forms, and tell me then, can you sit with an unfeeling insensibility at the board of luxury, and shut your heart against the distress that surrounds you? No; such opportunities of mercy cannot be rejected without serious danger. Should you leave the present objects that solicit your charity unrelieved, you risk the loss of God's grace-nay, what the avaricious may value more, the loss of that very wealth which they fear would be diminished by their bounty. What! lose their wealth by the very gripe with which they strive to secure it? Yes; and as St. Chrysostom well remarks: "Were we favoured with a view of the secret engines that sap the most prosperous fortunes, we should find the sighs, and tears, and imprecations of the poor among the most frequent and efficient instruments of their ruin." But why quote St. Chrysostom when the inspired writer tells us: "Injuries and wrongs will waste riches, and the house that is very rich shall be brought to nothing by pride: so the substance of the proud shall be rooted out. The prayer out of the mouth of the poor shall reach the ears of God, and judgment shall come for him speedily." Your fortune, then, instead of suffering from your charity, is, if you are deficient in

1 Ecclus. xxi. 5, 6.

this virtue, in danger of being transferred to more faithful stewards. "Make, then, to yourselves friends of the mammon of iniquity, that, when you shall fail, they may receive you into eternal tabernacles."1 The poor are called by St. Gregory the porters of heaven, and you may justly fear that your prayers will not find favour with the Almighty if you close your ears against their eloquent supplications. Perhaps you may think this is an assertion not sufficiently warranted. If you think so, the Book of Proverbs will tell you: "He that stoppeth his ears against the cry of the poor, shall also cry himself, and not be heard." Stop, then, your ears; if you will, you stop the ears of the Almighty against your own prayers; dole out a miserable pittance of relief; and if you have an iron heart, that never gave back a single tone of compassion or of mercy, go and boast of its firmness; but while you triumph in your tranquillity, recollect, too, that, like the treacherous calm that precedes the storm, your tranquillity may be but the prelude of your reprobation and your fall. Your prayers, then, alone will not be sufficient: they will not reach heaven without some medium to convey them; and if they are compared to the smoke of the incense which is grateful to the Lord, good works may be called the censers which send forth their odour to heaven. Recollect the heavenly vision in which Cornelius was assured that his conversion was owing to his prayers and his alms that were remembered in the sight of God. You, too, may have sinned, and may need reconciliation. Enlist, therefore, the powerful suffrages of the friends of the Almighty in your behalf; and as the prayers of the people had the effect of saving the life of Jonathan, which was forfeited to the law, so shall the united

'S. Luke, xvi. 9.

? Prov. xxi. 13.

' Acts, x. 31.

supplications of those you shall have relieved go forth to heaven, and change the sentence of your condemnation into one of merciful acquittal. Amen.

CHARITY SERMON FOR FEMALE PENITENTS.

"Deliver them that are led to death, and those that are drawn to death forbear not to deliver."-PROV. xxiv. 11.

WHATEVER might be the difference of opinion regarding the claims of other objects to the sympathies and active benevolence of the charitable, no one will dispute their titles to pity who have been conducted by their misfortunes to the very brink of death. A child abandoned to the miseries and perils of orphanage is an object that excites a just and lively compassion, and an appeal on the dangers that beset its tender and unprotected age is sure to engage all the efforts of the affluent and the charitable in providing the enclosures of education for its protection. The cries of distress in any shape or form are never addressed in vain to the Christian who has not extinguished by habitual cruelty that fellowfeeling which spontaneously prompts us to the relief of our suffering brethren. If misery, then, to use the thought of an eloquent pagan, displays, wherever it presents itself in human form, its title-deeds to the kindred sympathy and solace of every human heart, what must be the paramount claims of those objects who are victims to whatever is at once most pitiable and most frightful in human wretchedness? Virtuous and industrious families, fallen from comfort by sudden reverses of fortune, and pining in solitude, while a sense

of dignity and shame conceals their sorows and their tears to their tenements of woe, are doubtless objects which should melt the most obdurate with compassion. Their case is not still comparable to that of my unfortunate clients. Though doomed to misery, they are not led to death; though consigned to anguish, they have still the consolation to think that it will soon pass away; whilst those for whom I claim your interposition have been led to death, and, if not rescued, must be again drawn to that death which, instead of bringing oblivion to their misery, will only awake that sense of torment which shall last for ever.

In the brief but comprehensive sentence, Do unto others as you would wish to be done by,1 impressed on the human heart, and again revealed by the Redeemer in letters of light to the whole world, have the moralists and preachers of every age found a fruitful and inexhaustible theme when enforcing the obligations of charity. To the same divine precept shall I be content to confine myself in directing your attention to the claims of my penitents. Let the most obdurate and callous among my hearers suppose that when he first set out on his journey through life, when his steps were as yet feeble, and while he was unacquainted with the perils of the way, that he had the misfortune of falling in with robbers, who stripped him of the robes with which he was clothed in baptism, and after having rioted on the spoils of which they rifled him, abandoned him in the midst of the road, covered from head to foot with the wounds which their cruelty had inflicted. Suppose that, in that fallen and forlorn condition, when unable to rise or make any exertions of his own, some hard-hearted creatures were to pass, who, without any feeling for his lot, pursued their course, leaving

1 S. Luke, vi. 31.

him to that inevitable death to which, under such circumstances, he should soon fall a victim;-what, I ask you, would be the judgment which you would pronounce upon such an individual? Would it not be that of our Redeemer: "With what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again;"1 and as mercy is the reward of him that "showeth mercy," would not your heart, by the same just process of reasoning, consign to a different doom him who was steeled against its divine influence? Yes; and this judgment, however severe, would be but a development of that simple truth with which I preface this discourse, and which, as far as regards our conduct to others, may be the perfect standard of Christian morality. It is in vain, then, for the cruel and the hard-hearted to endeavour to soothe their consciences by the fancy that they have been guilty of no injustice, if that conscience reproves them with having refused to the distress of others that measure of merciful relief which they should have reasonably expected in their own.

What, think you, was the amount of the crime against which the Royal Prophet thundered this dire imprecation: "May his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow?" What was the additional guilt that called forth this additional malediction: "Let his children be carried about, vagabonds, and be cast out of their dwellings ?" Not content with this measure of vengeance, the Prophet still proceeds: "May there be none to pity or none to help his fatherless offspring." As if the evils of one generation were too limited for the enormity of his sins, he pursues his memory to after times: "May his posterity be cut off, and in one generation his name be blotted out." After pursuing his posterity until they utterly disappeared, and finding

'S. Matt. vii. 2.